Wild things and premonitions

So my wife is walking the dog today and is walking along the marsh near our house in downtown Apalachicola . She sees a police car on her normal dog walking path and asks the officer “what, are you staking out alligators now ” ? and he replied “no a 350 pound black bear”. Thats life in our very beautiful and very rural Apalachicola .

Did some fishing on Sunday and had an exceptional day on the water . In keeping with wild things as the theme of this post , we were looking for the elusive and endangered Federal Red Snapper as it was opening day for our new “Mini Season” with the new “Mini Limits” . So we are out about 8 or 10 miles past C Tower , looking at the bottom machine for a good place to start and we run across some floating buoys and alot of commotion on the surface around it which turned out to be some good size schools of small baitfish . I had a feeling we should put out a few trolling lures just in case there was something making this bait act like it was, other than the krill it appeared to be feeding on . There were a couple of pretty small but very new and functional Penn 209s with little noodlish rods and 20 LB test line on them set up for trolling so I clipped on a green and yellow dolphin lure and a black and purple jet head cedar plug and set the drags kinda loose and let em out . First pass nothing and second pass the starboard side with the cedar plug took off at high speed . Line was dissapearing fast and we quickly cleared the other line and put both Suzuki motors in reverse . I was the angler and Tony was the captain and Charlie was the mate and we worked it like we had done this together before ,but we hadnt . I kept steady pressure and we kept line on the reel and slowly gained on the mystery fish and then it would take off again . Thats where well maintained equipment [thanks Tony!] and patience pays off .About twenty minutes later the fish was down and stopped it’s runs and it was then a careful lifting game . When we finally saw color , my suspicions were confirmed . A big Wahoo !

It was whipped, thank god, because the cedar plug just fell out of its mouth when I slacked the line a little bit as Charlie was there with the gaff . For some strange reason before I left the house , Charlie checked the gaff on the boat which was a short one and called me on my cell to ask me to bring a long gaff . I thought to myself , I rarely utilize a gaff bottom fishing and one short on is usually fine but why not ? I threw one in the truck . Well Charlie was quick with the short one getting a gaff in the now free floating fish and Tony grabbed the long one , got a good headshot and they lifted the 60 Lb fish into the boat . There was the obligatory high fives and utter amazement at what had just occurred , and then another thing occured to me . I had filled a 200 Qt SSI cooler with ice the day before at the fish house and instead of transferring the ice to Tony’s smaller cooler in front of the console ,we put the 200 Qt.cooler on the boat and left the smaller one at the dock . Another premonition? Maybe . The Wahoo stuck out on both ends of the cooler but with the sloshing of the ice and saltwater we added , cooled the fish completely , head to tail.

So then its off to bottom fish for the elusive and endangered Federal Red Snapper . There was not a lot of activity on the bottom according to the Lowrance bottom machine at the Wahoo site , so we continued out to 20 fathoms to a place called the Greek Thumb. Its a coral bottom with lots of contours and valleys . We saw activity on the bottom and dropped baits . We had live cigar minnows ,hardtails,sqirrelfish as well as dead squid and sardines . Well, it did not matter what you lowered towards the bottom as you would instantly get hooked up to an endangered Federal Red Grouper. It was nearly impossible to catch a snapper the endangered red grouper were so thick . Every once in a while an endangered red snapper or triggerfish would push a grouper out of the way , but we got more practice with the required venting tool [ a turkey injector] than we ever anticipated. The three of us were now fighting over the venting tool as we were getting frustrated over the fact that we quickly reached our limit of one red grouper apiece and all were pretty good size . All but one or two snapper we caught were of legal size as well .The venting tool rule is a good thing . Its wild that there is data that says these fish are scarce . There are more and larger Snapper and red Grouper now than any time I have fished here in my almost ten years of fishing the northern Gulf . All of my commercial fisherman friends agree , and most have realized that conservation is what will keep their careers viable. What this tells me is that the policies that were in place before our “mini Limits” and “mini seasons” worked . It also tells me that the rulemakers dont fish. I will step down from my soapbox now .

We headed in to look at other bottom and found massive piles of beeliners mixed with endangered red snappers to easily finish off our “mini Limits” .

We stopped at a popular and well known wreck on the way in and caught ,vented and released more snapper and picked up legal size Amberjack or as Tony calls them “reef donkeys” .

It was a wild day on the water in a wild place and it is why I fish , not to mention the Wahoo we have been enjoying wildly .

Marc